Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb (he headed the Manhattan Project which built, tested, and was responsible for exploding the bombs which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wrote early in the superpower arms race, in Foreign Affairs, in 1953, that:
"...our twenty-thousandth bomb...will not in any deep strategic sense offset their (the USSR's) two-thousandth...
We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life."
Quote appearing in Richard Rhodes' "Arsenals of Folly," (Knopf, 2007)
The problem with the nuclear arms race was that it was based on emotion, not reason.
Given the emotion, the arguments were certainly logical enough.
But given the foundation, fear, the fear that the other side, armed with nukes pointed at you, if given the slightest opening, would certainly pull the trigger and destroy you, regardless of poisoning the air for everyone else, the logic was irrebuttable.
The problem with Cold War logic is that we now know that neither side intended to take that shot, even if it had the chance.
The U.S. was the world's sole superpower from 1945 until the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear device in August, 1949. Rhodes, p. 70.
Yet we didn't attack when we had the chance. Why?
Apparently we had no need or desire to attack our devastated wartime ally, even when it had only one, or a handful, of devices, which it couldn't deliver without being blown away while attacking or in retaliation.
Later both sides cooperated, interacted might be a better word, in a system called Mutually Assured Destruction ("MAD"). Whichever risked taking that first shot would find itself destroyed in retaliation. Madness became normal. Cold War logic had triumphed.
The war devastated the Soviet Union, which is commonly said to have lost 25 million people to fighting, freezing, and famine, induced by the war. The U.S. sent many convoys of food, fuel, and ammunition, from the East Coast to Murmansk, north of Norway, to keep the Soviets in the war against Hitler, forcing him to divide his forces East and West. We feared the communist system more than we feared the Soviets, perhaps.
That fear spread to the U.S. and demagogues here played it for all it was worth politically, which was a great deal. This is how Richard Nixon came to power and how Sen. Joseph McCarthy came to have his name applied to an age of unreason.
Whole societies, nations, can go mad. Don't we think the French are a little ga-ga? I'm sure they do about us.
How does a society or a nation go around the bend?
By letting the first bit of unreason take root and building upon it a structure that leads to a dead end. Lenin did this. And Hitler likewise.
Some people think that our basic premise, that all men are created equal and capable of running their own affairs ("democracy"), is madness. We all know that all people are not in terms of physical endowment and political entitlement. What this means is that all men are morally equal before the law. Each is entitled to be treated with basic human respect (called dignity) even when occupying the status of an enemy or a criminal. We do this for them, but just as importantly, for us, and insist that others do the same. Hence human rights treaties including the U.N. Charter and Declaration of Human Rights and the Helsinki Agreements during the Carter Administration.
There are those who seek to provide alternative systems based on the idea that some are more equal than others and we-know-best based on this ideology or that, imposed without consent from above. The result is a communist system such as the Soviet Union's, or a totalitarian system such as Hitler's, based on race, or a fascist system such as Mussolini's in Italy before the war.
How do we know that the Soviets wouldn't have sneaked a nuclear device into our shores and blasted New York, for example?
Rhodes's book contains various reports of the comments of Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and various former Soviet military leaders interviewed after the fall of the USSR, to the effect that they realized it would be madness to attempt such a thing. They weren't all crazy, as we believed. They had their crazies and we had ours, but for the most part the top leaders of both countries were not insane. Rather they had a healthy fear of reducing each other, and in the process, themselves, and the rest of the world, to rubble.
If the Soviets had crippled the U.S., what would they do with their supposed advantage? Control the world? This is a pipe dream. The Soviets feared China far more than they feared us. Why? China was their neighbor, who they never liked very much. The feeling was mutual. Nationalism outweighed Marxism-Leninism
But we never believed this. The Russians were all crazy, we were led to believe, and that was it.
I think we were projecting our own worst-case fears. If ever a nation needed a good shrink, it was, and remains, us.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev did not send in the tanks, as his predecessors had done in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968.
"...Hungary (a Warsaw Pact nation, i.e. a Soviet dominated satellite) opened its border with Austria and thousands of East Germans who had traveled to Hungary to wait crossed into the West, to be followed in the weeks ahead by thousands more." Rhodes, p. 287.
For this we owe Gorbachev a great debt of gratitude, not our own president, Reagan, or his successor, George H.W. Bush, father of the current president.
In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased existence, supplanted by its former constituent parts. Boris Yeltsin took control of the suitcase containing the activation codes for the nuclear weapons scattered throughout the former USSR. The U.S. Department of Defense invested in helping to secure these left-over weapons from the Cold War, which Rhodes calls the best investment ever made by DOD. p. 292
The Cold War superpower arms race lasted 42 years, from 1949 to 1991. What did the two scorpions in the bottle get for it?
The Soviet side remained impoverished. Domestic spending was an afterthought to military spending, the civilians obtaining the leftovers. Education, health-care, agriculture, social services, scraped along at survival levels.
At a conference in 1994, the former Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin learned that U.S. nuclear strategy was not based on making a preemptive first strike. Our strategy was to shoot back only when we saw their missiles leave the silo. This didn't give us a lot of time, hence Reagan's belief in a very far out plan, figuratively as well as literally, that he called the Strategic Defense Initiative and everyone else called "Star Wars." It never got off the ground.
"Nevertheless, hundreds of billions were spent to counterbalance the mutual fear of a sudden nuclear attack when -- as we now know --neither side ever conceived of such a strategy because it knew what horrors it would visit on both." p. 298.
Yes, a nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR would've resembled the destroyed Hiroshima facing the destroyed Nagasaki.
One of history's great ironies, according to Richard J. Barnet, described by Rhodes as an "activist-scholar," was that:
"at the very moment when the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, possessed most of the world's gold, produced half the world's goods on its own territory, and laid down the rules for allies and adversaries alike, it was afraid" (p. 298).
"How did we come to such a pass? I was raised to believe that Americans were a courageous people. Weren't you?" Rhodes asks.
He argues that all of this so-called deterrence might have been justified had it deterred. But it didn't. p. 297.
Why?
Because neither side was planning a first strike in the first place even before each placed a gun to the head of the other.
Apparently they felt unable to sit down and work things out. There was more than an absence of trust. There was positive distrust.
No wonder we went 42 years thinking we'd wind up a crisp.
The U.S. was involved in any number of conflicts with Soviet client states, such as North Korea and, we imagined, North Vietnam. Yes there was always the fear, and risk, of resort to use of nuclear weapons to destroy the enemy on the ground, but no American president, in both these losing efforts, resorted to that. Gen. MacArthur, in Korea, wanted to nuke Red China, but Pres. Truman not only held him back, but recalled him. Supporters of these wars argue that we should have turned our troops loose and backed them for victory using all of the arrows in our quiver, including nuclear. But what do you win when in order to win the game you have to nuke your adversary? You won't be playing Monopoly on that board any longer.
"Threat inflation," as Rhodes calls the fear-mongering endemic to the Cold War, was crucial to maintaining the defense budgets of the Cold War. Whenever the American public, via Congress, became the least bit reluctant to throw yet another billion dollars down the nuclear rat-hole, the demagogues would ...demagogue the issue, waving the bloody shirt of Soviet perfidy (which existed in spades, not that we had clean hands). There's not much you can do against demagoguery, is there? An appeal to reason always loses to an appeal to fear and panic.
Have you seen this? You have.
What happened after 9-11? The U.S. was attacked on its own soil, in N.Y. and D.C.
The World Trade Center adjacent to Wall Street and the Pentagon, the symbols and actuality of U.S. power in the world were attacked. Panic followed as we awaited the next blow. George W. flogged the fear that Al Qaeda might fight us on the main street of Kansas City for all it is worth. He continues to do this years after the attack.
The American people, despite proclaiming ourselves "the land of the free and the home of the brave," are not so brave and not so free, when we can be buffaloed and manipulated the way we constantly have been.
We need to be inoculated against fear, as Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to do in his first inaugural address, in 1933, when the country was in a dire depression, as he reassured the nation, which needed it:
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
In 1991, the time of the Gulf War, Sec'y of Defense Dick Cheney resisted further reductions in our nuclear stockpile:
"...he distrusted arms negotiations" Rhodes reports," and feared they would encourage reductions in the defense budget. He had already decided there would be no peace dividend from the demise of the Soviet Union." p. 292.
Colin Powell, head of the National Security Council, "thought otherwise, telling the Army Times that year " [1991]:
"I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung"
Possession of nuclear weapons, the ultimate weapon in existence, made you important. If the Air Force was given nuclear bombs to deliver via the Strategic Air Command (SAC), the Navy wanted them on their ballistic missile submarines. The Army wanted to shoot them off in the artillery. If these guys had nukes, the Marines wanted theirs. Only the Coast Guard didn't get nukes. I think. Not as important, obviously.
Powell commissioned a study of tactical nukes.
"The staff's recommendation was to get rid of the small, artillery-fired nukes because they were trouble-prone, expensive to modernize and irrelevant in the present world of highly accurate conventional weapons." p. 292
"The four service chiefs, lobbied by the Army artilleryman among them, rejected the recommendation."
"[T]he nukes were a matter of prestige to the artillery," Powell said.
Rhodes makes an interesting Conlaw related argument concerning "sovereignty."
Sovereignty, from sovereign, meaning the king or maximum ruler, means who, in a society, has the final say in deciding anything. In a monarchy, the king or queen holds this power of war or peace, life or death, freedom or imprisonment, ownership of property, control of social relations, etc., or not.
The American Revolution changed that, for us. Sovereignty, the final say, was then said to reside in us, "We, the people," as our Constitution begins in the preamble, not King George III. This was new. We could vote on war and peace and the laws on property and marriage, etc.
Today, Rhodes, observes, there's another locus of sovereignty: control of a nation's nuclear weapons.
Interesting thought. Movies have been made about rogue submarine captains threatening to nuke the world without permission. At least I think they have. In order to enjoy our nukes, we have to place them in the hands of army, navy and air force officers. Who is to say that one of these people won't go nuts and use them on us if he doesn't like the way things are going?
Who do you think is more likely to use a nuke against us? A foreign terrorist who doesn't like our power and would have trouble acquiring a suitcase or cargo-container nuke, or a disgruntled American officer sitting on a nuke, which he controls, who thinks the White House has sold out the country?
The idea that helped most to wind down the Cold War's superpower arms race was the Soviet Union's realization, Gorbachev's realization, that there was greater security in sitting down together to thrash out mutual interests and problems than in pointing guns at each other.
Both countries lost terribly in lost development and production over a period of decades.
Do you think we will learn from this long, dreadful, experience?
I hope so, but the thought I can't get away from is that the world doesn't run reason. It runs on emotion. And unless and until we somehow get our emotions under control, we're going to have the hard men like Dick Cheney advocating for larger defense budgets to protect against not only bad guys on the ground but boogie-men in their minds, their worst, excessive fears, impervious to fact and reason.
It seems to me that we Americans should accept that no matter how much we do in the world that we think is good, there will be many opposed, some of whom represent a real threat against which we must prepare.
We do this with police forces against criminals who rob, rape, and murder. We don't spend every last cent on cops, however, nor give them unlimited authority.
We give far more money and authority to kill to our military.
Perhaps we'd better tighten up the leash not only on our defense forces, but on us, the civilians.
Life is a risk.
That doesn't mean that we have to surround ourself with a poison moat into which we ourselves may fall to protect against interlopers. Maginot lines didn't work for France against Germany. Why should mental Maginot lines, at great expense and risk, work any better?
I'll end with a word of wisdom from the Director of Archaeology at Pompeii, Italy, Baldassare Conticello, who was in a dispute with municipal authorities who wanted to build a highway over a site where he wanted to dig. A public hearing on the issue was coming up when a supporter advised that he had nothing to worry about because all of the rational arguments were on his side. The director's response?
"The period of maximum danger is when all of the rational arguments are on your side."
I pulled that from an article on the controversy reported the N.Y. Times in 1987.